Gritty Book Sets Prudence Aside

By DINITIA SMITH

Published: June 27, 1995

"Don't approach history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruits," the author Tobias Wolff wrote to Mary Karr in January 1991, as she embarked on "The Liars' Club," her memoir of her East Texas childhood, published this month by Viking. "Don't be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else," Mr. Wolff wrote. "Take no care for your dignity." And indeed, Ms. Karr did not. She has written one of the rawest memoirs by a serious American writer in years: the story of her childhood in "the Texas Ringworm Belt," oil-refinery country where the cancer rate rivals Bhopal's and Chernobyl's, in a town Business Week called one of the 10 ugliest on the planet.

Ms. Karr's mother suffered from something known locally as "Nervous." She married seven times -- twice to Ms. Karr's father -- and spent stretches of Ms. Karr's childhood insensible from drugs and alcohol. She set fire to Ms. Karr's toys, and tried to kill her. And as if all this wasn't enough to make a person miserable, at the age of 7 Ms. Karr was raped by a neighborhood boy and a short while later molested by her babysitter, all of which she discusses explicitly. Indeed, she takes no care for her dignity in the memoir, which Michiko Kakutani, reviewing it in The New York Times, called "an astonishing book."

Still, for someone who minces no words on paper, Ms. Karr is oddly private in person. "At this time I feel very protective of my 74-year-old mother," she said recently on a visit to New York from her job as a professor of creative writing and literature at Syracuse University. (Mr. Wolff, who wrote about his own harsh upbringing in "This Boy's Life," is a colleague.) She will not reveal the true name of the town that became Leechfield, Tex., in her memoir. Nor will she talk much about her own drinking, except to say, "I can't drink alcohol." And she will not discuss her drug taking, though she mentions it in her book, or the possibility that she may have spent time in a recovery program. "You're not supposed to say," she said.

For anyone who doesn't come from East Texas, Ms. Karr's memoir is like an anthropologist's account of a foreign country. This is a place where people "hunker down," and "hork" hot dogs, and insult is an art form. "You could see evil in the crotch of a tree," Ms. Karr's mother says to someone who has criticized her. And when a local man wakes from a coma mentally impaired, he is "half a bubble off-plumb."

Ms. Karr's book has a cast of Southern eccentrics right out of a Flannery O'Connor story. Her mother read Sartre and Camus, and told her daughters bedtime stories about Athens in the age of Socrates and fin-de-siecle Vienna. Ms. Karr's father, an oil driller, was a storyteller too, a man who shaped raw experience into the rise and fall of narrative, who took a poet's joy in the language, and who let his daughter listen in when he was with his drinking buddies, the Liars' Club.

Mary Karr went on to lead a wild life of her own. She left home at 17, fled to California and camped out with a group of surfers in a Lincoln Continental.

Only when she was grown, and rummaging in the attic for some papers, did she confront the secret that shaped her family: the existence of two children kidnapped from her mother by one of her husbands, who then disappeared. Suddenly, the reasons for her mother's need for oblivion, and her many marriages, became clear. Her mother had "started marrying people to get her kids back," Ms. Karr said. The night of Ms. Karr's discovery, Ms. Karr and her mother got drunk. "Why didn't you tell me?," Ms. Karr demanded. According to the memoir, her mother replied, "I thought you wouldn't like me anymore."

"Her exact sentence stays lodged in my head," Ms. Karr writes, "for it's one of the most pathetic sentences a 60-year-old woman can be caught uttering."

Partly out of a desire to shape this chaos into meaning, Ms. Karr always wanted to be a writer. She published a poem in Mother Jones magazine, a result of a chance encounter with the poet Denise Levertov. She was admitted to a writing course at Goddard College, where she met Mr. Wolff and wrote an essay on the poet John Ashbery's use of "non-linear" time. She moved to Boston, where she was a marketing communications manager for a computer company in Cambridge and a research fellow in managerial economics at the Harvard Business School. "If you're a poor kid you do what you have to do to make money," Ms. Karr said. Still, she managed to publish two books of poetry.

Along the way, she married a man from a very different background, whose idea of family life, she writes, was to speak to "his mother on holidays, from one end of a long, glossy dinner table." She will not reveal his identity, except to say that he went to Harvard, is a poet and teaches at a prep school in Connecticut. The marriage produced a son, Devereux Milburn, now 12. Three years ago, the marriage broke up.

Few poets can live off poetry. Ms. Karr had been trying to write a novel about her crazy childhood, without success. In 1989, both she and Mr. Wolff won $25,000 Whiting Writers' Awards, cash prizes given annually to 10 promising writers. At a dinner with Mr. Wolff and his agent, Amanda Urban, she told some of her stories about her family. Ms. Urban was intrigued, and urged her to write a memoir, asking for a proposal, three chapters and a delivery date.